Market Trends
E-store Merchandising—The layout and merchandising of the electronic or online store or website, i.e., e-store, is becoming critically important to online retailers, i.e., e-tailers. The e-tailers need to know how customers are shopping their sites so e-tailers can understand how products and promotions are viewed by customers and where to place internal site promotions. Awareness of customer or shopper traffic patterns also helps e-tailers maximize the value of advertising space sold to vendors.
E-store Marketing—Revenues from the e-store site come from direct product revenue as well as display and vendor ads. It is important to understand the traffic patterns and the types of customers on each area of the site to optimize funds for marketing promotions on the site.
Visualization and OLAP reporting functionality currently exist in separate products, e.g., Visual Insights' Advizor and eBiz, Tom Sawyer, Cognos, and MicroStrategy, but the individual products are not integrated. A user is forced to select reports or visualizations, metrics, and filters in each individual tool and then align and compare the results for each set of data to be analyzed. The selection, alignment and comparison process is time consuming and user intensive requiring a substantial investment of time for a user to be able to analyze data. Further complicating matters, the user is required to use multiple, different, individual tools. Thus, there is a need in the art for a web site visualization tool integrating visualization and OLAP reporting functionality.